


To Carry Your Light

by SummerFrost



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Art, F/F, Ghosts, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-28
Updated: 2017-05-28
Packaged: 2018-11-05 18:23:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11018985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SummerFrost/pseuds/SummerFrost
Summary: Mandy and Jenny discover that they can communicate with Lardo through her art.





	To Carry Your Light

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this piece for [The Women of Check, Please! Zine](https://omgcpwomen.tumblr.com/post/161138167722/click-here-to-download-the-women-of-check-please) which was compiled by Karo aka bluegrasshole on Tumblr! The entire zine is _fantastic,_ please give it a read  <3
> 
> Thank you to my fantastic beta, shipped-goldstandard <3
> 
> Title from Wildflower by Smashing Pumpkins

It’s February. The Haus is empty except for Jenny and Mandy—who sighs dramatically and rolls off the top bunk, spinning through the air until she comes to a stop a few inches above the floor. Sometimes, it can almost still feel like she’s falling.

 _‘I hate when they’re all gone,’_ she whines, and Jenny hums sympathetically from her seat on Holster’s desk. It’s always a mad bummer when the whole Haus is empty—sometimes they just kind of go away when no one’s there, but there’s never telling when they’ll get to come back and it’s scary. So they try to stay. It’s just that there’s only, like, so much to talk about after a few decades of this though, and even though Mandy loves Jenny a ton it can get a little boring.

It’s better when the boys and Lardo are around, which is why they both perk up when they hear the front door open and close. The footsteps are distinctly Lardo’s, so the girls drift down from the attic to wait in her room. If they’re lucky, Lardo will be working on something for school—it’s always rad to watch her create art.

Lardo curses as she comes up the stairs and tries to shoulder her way into the room, but it’s locked. Jenny hears her fumbling with her keys, so she slips her hand into the lock and turns it, then tugs the door open.

Lardo freezes for a second and mutters, “What?” under her breath, but then pushes the door all the way open and steps inside. Her arms are filled with— _yay!_ —painting supplies, including a long canvas rolled up in a tube. Jenny shares a silent cheer with Mandy, who smiles back at her fondly.

“Stupid Haus,” Lardo grumbles, which is a little rude but Jenny forgives her.

After putting her stuff down by her desk, Lardo starts setting up her canvas and her palette, which looks like it’ll be filled with watercolor paints today. Jenny settles into Lardo’s bean bag chair and Mandy rests in her lap, arms curling around her neck while they watch. Lardo plays music while she paints, spreading broad strokes of soft color across the canvas—pastel shades that remind Mandy of being young—young and alive and running through the local carnival with cotton candy sticking to her fingers.

It’s just a color on a painting and it makes her feel far away from herself, like there are particles drifting apart from her body.

Lardo has the window open and the door cracked to create a cross-breeze while she works, and Mandy presses little kisses into Jenny’s hair, against her cheek and the side of her jaw—Jenny’s not sure which ones she can feel and which she’s imagining, drawing up memories from little corners of her heart. Sometimes she wonders if she could use them all up—if one day she won’t remember how to feel anything at all.

After a while, Jenny gets up and drifts over to float next to Lardo, leaning in close to watch the paint bleed across the canvas.

 _‘I love how the colors spread,’_ she says, and reaches out with a hand to trace the crawl of chiffon pink towards a blank patch in the corner.

The paint stutters and jerks the way beer trembles in Solo cups when Holster has the stereo blasting on Friday nights—and blooms into the jittery silhouette of a daisy flower, petals stretching like trembling fingers across the white of the canvas.

Jenny jumps back and Lardo drops her paint brush onto the ground. It clatters against the floorboards and splatters flecks of watery paint onto her bare legs.

“What the shit?” she mutters, staring at the painting in wary disbelief. She puts a hand up to her forehead and wipes at her hairline absentmindedly.

 _‘What did you just do?’_ Mandy asks nervously.

A locked door, old music leaking from iPod speakers—that’s the kind of thing they can put their fingers to, not this—not creating.

Jenny fiddles with the hem of her t-shirt. _‘Maybe it wasn’t me?’_

Mandy chews on her bottom lip. She pulls out a tube of lipgloss, swipes on a fresh coat, and goes back to chewing.

Lardo picks up her paint brush, rinses it off, and switches to green.

It takes less than a minute for Jenny to get the nerve back, creeping up slowly until she’s right next to the canvas again, eyes tracing the swipe of Lardo’s brush. She stretches her hand forward, fingers hovering up against the canvas, not quite touching even if she could.

Nothing happens and then it does.

The green—grass blades, she realizes even though she hadn’t before—quivers and dances like the breeze creeping in from the window has wandered into the painting through Jenny’s fingertips, and new leaves spring up in the empty spaces, stretch and grow and fidget into life.

Lardo says, “Holy fuck—”

And the stalks sprout buds that unfurl into flowers—wildflowers of every color—purple and pink and weeping blue like the ones Jenny would run through her fingers when she laid in the grass near her high school, watching clouds drift by until the end-of-lunch bell rang.

A meadow dances under Jenny’s hand and she pulls away. Something in her heart twinges when all the flowers go still—frozen in the drying paint.

“Oh my—” Lardo whispers, mouth hung open. “I’m not even _high, fuck.”_

Mandy leaves the beanbag chair and comes to float next to Jenny, taking her hand. There’s a trembling energy in her—something almost alive.

Lardo puts her brush down with mechanical care and looks around the room, like she’s waiting for one of the boys to jump out and admit they were pranking her. She has paint smeared across her face, glistening faintly in the light.

“Rans—Ransom never shuts the fuck up about this place being haunted,” she says, louder than she’s been speaking. “Is that—is that what this is? Am I—I’m not hallucinating—I’m not—?”

Mandy shares a look with Jenny before she reaches out and grazes her fingers across the top of Lardo’s phone, sticking out from her pocket.

 _Stayin’ Alive_ by the Bee Jees blares out of the speakers, somewhere in the middle of the chorus, interrupting the song Lardo had playing.

Lardo jumps back with a startled, cracking laugh that sounds a little hysterical. “Of course we have a fucking ghost,” she says. “Of fucking course we do.”

Mandy pulls her hand away and the music stops, allowing Lardo’s classical instrumental to resume. She brushes her hair away from her face and looks over at Jenny with a curious expression, head tilting towards the canvas.

Jenny just shrugs, and watches as Mandy reaches her hand out and touches it to the upper half of the canvas, the sky Lardo had been painting into a pastel sunset. The colors twist and blend into an epicenter—a golden sun that curls and shimmers under her touch.

Lardo watches, awestruck, and Jenny reaches out to add her—energy, she guesses—to the painting too. A sapling springs from the ground and shudders with growth as it stretches up towards the sky, whorls of brown and green as branches and leaves sprout and the trunk grows thicker, sturdier. The earth underneath the tree undulates as if invisible roots are spreading underneath.

“There’s two of you?” Lardo looks around the room again, like she’s searching for them. Mandy waves her free hand in front of her face cheekily; she doesn’t even flinch. “There’s—wait. The sorority? I always thought that was like, an urban legend but it’s—it’s true, isn’t it?”

Jenny pulls her hand away from the canvas and Mandy follows, and the paint resettles into tranquility.

“Shit, dudes,” Lardo breathes, and runs a hand through her hair again. “So you were—what, pledges? And—God, I’m so sorry.”

Jenny drags her hand across the painting and leaves a crop of white daisies in her wake.

Lardo nods jerkily, like she’s still not sure about what she’s even doing. “And you—you’ve just been stuck here ever since? That blows.”

Mandy turns back to Jenny, quirking her lips. Her eyes—blue and easily-translucent in the afternoon light like this—are solid weights of melancholy, warm. _‘Hasn’t been so bad, has it?’_

 _‘Not when I have you,’_ Jenny answers, and closes her eyes around the ache of it. When they go away there’s—she’s not sure if it’s nothing, but there’s no Mandy and that’s—she doesn’t have to bother with another word. She’d do anything to stay—rude, gross boys banging around and all.

Jenny opens her eyes and reaches out.

Mandy takes her hand and kisses at the fingertips, feather-light brushes that tickle at her like the gentle flutter of butterfly wings.

Jenny feels every one.

They reach out together and touch the tree, hands still laced at the fingers and—

Lardo gasps as vines begin to wind up the trunk, thick and dark and the most solid thing about the painting—almost unnatural compared to the soft watercolor surrounding them—and sprout shimmering buds of blood-red, like the pinprick on fingers or—

Mandy’s lungs—the place lungs used to be—swell in her chest and the buds unfurl into roses, bright and lovely and ethereal in all the ways it feels when they kiss and both feel it, heavy with things larger than anyone could hold and weightless for all that it could be a burden. The roses sway in the same unknown breeze and swell larger still, and Jenny pulls their hands away in fear that they could burst.

“You’re in love,” Lardo whispers, like it needs to be a secret. She takes a step back from the canvas.

“You’re in love,” she repeats, like she could tell the world. Her voice goes even quieter, like she’s used to carrying beautiful things close to her chest, when she says, “Me too.”

Jenny smiles. She probably imagines it when her lips ache.

Mandy brings her hand back to the canvas and trails it across the meadow, eyes closed in concentration, as she brings new flowers to life—soft blue ones with little yellow centers like buttons.

Lardo laughs, smirking, and asks, “Forget-me-nots? That’s a little heavy-handed, isn’t it?”

The girls laugh, soft little bell-sounds, and Lardo turns toward them like—

Almost—

“I’ll remember you,” she says softly. Her eyes are wet and fixed above Jenny’s left shoulder. “I promise—I’ll remember.”

 

~*~

 

It’s April. There’s a painting in an art gallery with roses the color of raw hearts and wildflowers that seem to tremble in the breeze, if you blink at just the right time.

It isn’t for sale.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me [on Tumblr!](http://www.yoursummerfrost.tumblr.com)


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